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JYONGRI is a singer of Korean Heritage who was born in Osaka. She went to international school and is fluent in English as well as Japanese, and incorporates English into her songs. She started writing her own lyrics and music from a young age, having even attended the summer music program in Berklee College of Music. Her trademark is her playing a forward-tilting electronic keyboard both in music videos and in live performances.

It’s only been a month since the release of her last single, “Boku wa Kuma”, and Utada has finished the year off by releasing a DVD of her summer tour, “Utada United 2006”. Being a HUGE Utada fan, I was obviously pleasantly surprised when the tracklist contained almost all of her singles (with the only obvious ones missing being “for you/time LIMIT”). Unfortunately, I was also disappointed by the appearance of some “Exodus” songs, which I felt were complete crap.

It’s been 4 years since Utada’s last Japanese album, “Deep River”. During this time, she got and recovered from cancer, got married, released the overdue best album, the disastrous, disappointing, yet record breaking English album “Exodus”, and half a dozen singles.

“Ultra Blue” marks a few firsts for Utada – the first duet to ever appear on her album, the first time there isn’t a track that shares the album name, and the first time she released a Japanese digital single. For promotion of the album, Utada began on a 3 months tour, the “UTADA UNITED 2006”, across Japan. The tour has been much hyped about and was met with praise, with most tickets selling out in 2 hours.

Utada Hikaru’s 14th single, “Be My Last”, was released on the 28th of September 2005. This single debuted at the top position on the daily Oricon charts on its release day. “Be My Last” also managed to achieve the first position on the weekly chart, selling about 80,043 copies to date. By taking a look at the sales amount of Hikki’s earlier releases, one can notice that, compared to Hikki’s standards this single didn’t fare well, at all.

The reason why this single is selling so poorly, is mainly because there is only one song included in this single. This single doesn’t even include the instrumental version of “Be My Last”. The cover design also is not really attractive and rather plain. So it is not surprising that many J-Pop fans do doubt the worthiness of this single.